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Can we talk? Better speech technology with Phonetic Arts
December 3, 2010
In Star Trek, they don’t spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards—they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back. It’s a more natural way to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems. We’ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice
input
: for example, we launched
Voice Search
,
Voice Input
and
Voice Actions
for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started
automatically transcribing speech to produce captions
on YouTube videos.
But what about when the computer speaks to you—in other words, voice
output
? There are already places you can hear this in action today—for example, Google Translate
“speaks” translated text in multiple languages
, and you can
listen to navigation instructions
as you drive—but there’s still a lot to do. That’s why we’re pleased to announce we’ve acquired
Phonetic Arts
, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England. Phonetic Arts’ team of researchers and engineers work at the cutting edge of speech synthesis, delivering technology that generates natural computer speech from small samples of recorded voice.
There’s a
particular focus
right now in the U.K. on technology and innovation, and we’re delighted to be deepening our investment in the country with this acquisition. We already have a strong engineering center in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team. We are excited about their technology, and while we don’t have plans to share yet, we’re confident that together we’ll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future.
Posted by Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology
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